Forum:Social Security is a Ponzi scheme
Social Security is known by critics as a Ponzi scheme. If we really listen to their arguments, they have a point. Any financial investment that pays out money that it has not yet earned is a problem, and Social Security started paying benefits two years early, in 1940. (A good book to read that boils down this issue is Generation Debt by Anya Kamenetz. ISBN 1594489076) :According to the Congressional Budget Office, Americans born between 1876 and 1937 are projected to receive a total of $8.1 trillion more out of the Social Security system than they paid into it. To make up that shortfall, some of us in future generations will be getting back less than we put in. - Generation Debt, p. 164 So what is the problem? I think one problem is that we have a generation in this country who don't believe that they will see the benefit of this program that our parent's generation will be depending on. I know I don't. And it makes me very angry that I can't depend on my own government to keep its promises. That is making people question whether the program should exist, an attitude that the top levels of the Republican Party have been using to their advantage for the past 20-30 years. Their intention is to eliminate the program altogether by moving the money into privately held, privately controlled investment accounts that depend on the stock market to provide people with their retirement. They're playing a game, and the risk is to our future. Given that as the problem, the solution is to be honest about the program. That's why I gave this post the title, to get people's attention. We need to end the Ponzi scheme frame, and make people realize that we have a big issue on our hands. That issue is whether we, the working generation, are willing to pool our financial resources and provide an income to our elders, the disabled and children who need help. If you think people should go back in time and start saving all the money they need, you can invent the time machine. The fact is that people right now are spending more money than they are earning. They're digging into home equity to finance spending habits that they can't maintain, especially if the housing bubble bursts. We need to identify an enemy, and do everything possible to fight against that enemy. To me, the enemy is DEBT. Credit cards, 2nd and 3rd mortgages, school loans, car loans. Anything the financial institutions can do to promise us a wonderful life now and prevent us from seeing the storm clouds on the horizon, they'll do. That gives them our money to earn interest on, and as long as they are earning their money, they could care less about us. And anything the media can do to prevent us from thinking about those storm clouds, they'll do. Distractions all. And those distractions are going to destroy us. President Roosevelt created Social Security to prevent this country from having a Socialist revolution. We were really close in 1934, because people were starving in the streets, and the conservative Supreme Court was striking down law after law that Congress was trying to pass to get us through the bad years. It got to the point that Roosevelt considered a Constitutional Amendment that would boost the number of people on the Supreme Court so he could pack it with people who would support his programs. That failed, and the Court upheld the Social Security Act in 1937. Economic security was established as part of the general welfare that was in the Preamble of the Constitution. So what do we do? We need a Financial Empowerment Act that will identify key weaknesses in our financial infrastructure and empower the people themselves to find the solutions. Chadlupkes 21:06, 10 September 2006 (UTC)